British Airways IT failure not due to outsourcing to India, says CEO

The embattled Chief Executive of the British Airways Alex Cruz on Monday ruled out resigning over the crippling flight disruption and maintained that the computer glitch had nothing to do with cutting costs or outsourcing IT services to India.

Cruz said a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes", but the back-up system of the airline had not worked properly. He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India. Cruz told the BBC that he will not resign and that flight disruption had nothing to do with cutting costs.

"I can confirm that all the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country," he told Sky News.

"They have all been local issues around a local data centre." BA's GMB union has said outsourcing IT jobs to India could have made the problems worse. The union spokesperson said it could have been avoided had "hundreds of dedicated and loyal" not been replaced by cheaper Indian staff in 2016.

Cruz also said that no BA passengers' data had been compromised in the IT meltdown and said there was no evidence it was the result of a cyber attack, promising not to allow such an outage to happen again.

The IT failure was caused by a short but catastrophic power surge at 9.30 am on Saturday that affected the company's messaging system, he said, and the backup system failed to work properly.